The gunman who killed five employees at the Capital Gazette newspaper is set to be sentenced Tuesday.

       The penalty will mark an end to the grueling legal battle that started June 28, 2018, when Jarrod Ramos stormed the Annapolis newsroom with the intention of killing as many people as possible.

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       This summer, a jury found Ramos had the mental and emotional capacity to be held criminally responsible for the mass shooting. Although Ramos had pleaded guilty to the murders, he had argued he was not legally sane at the time and should be sent to a psychiatric hospital with the potential for release instead of prison. The jury had arrived at its verdict in less than two hours.

       Capital Gazette gunman found criminally responsible for killing five in Md. newsroom shooting

       Ramos attempted to expedite the sentencing by writing a letter to Judge Michael Wachs asking for an earlier hearing date and expressing concern with the quality of his representation. Wachs denied the request at an August hearing, siding with Anne Arundel State’s Attorney Anne Colt Leitess, who said those impacted by the attack had already booked travel to be in Annapolis for the Sept. 28 date.

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       “I hate to say this so bluntly,” Leitess said in court that day, “but why are we moving the case up for the defendant’s convenience?”

       During the weeks-long trial in July, survivors of the shooting relived their worst days to testify before the jury. The family members of those who were killed — Gerald Fischman, Rob Hiaasen, John Mc-Namara, Rebecca Smith and Wendi Winters — sat in the courtroom and watched video footage of their loved one’s last breaths.

       She prosecuted killers for decades. Then she took on the Capital Gazette mass shooter.

       Many of them are expected to return to Annapolis on Tuesday in what they hope will be a moment of closure. Earlier this month, the state’s attorney’s office submitted 17 victim impact statements to the judge, 11 of which were written by the family members those killed and survivors of Ramos’s attack.

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       At least a dozen people are expected to speak in court on behalf of the victims, Leitess said.

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       During the trial, Ramos’s defense argued that three mental disorders fed his fixation with the Capital Gazette and Maryland judiciary. But prosecutors cast Ramos as a vengeful man who grew obsessed with the local paper after it published a column in 2011 about his guilty plea in a harassment case. When Ramos lost his defamation suit and failed to have the article removed, prosecutors said, he plotted a calculated rampage to end the lives of those employed by and associated with the local newspaper.

       Ramos, who had filed numerous lawsuits in the years leading up to the mass shooting, said in the letter to Wachs that he does not “wish to litigate anything more.”